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Text and Textuality
Text and Textuality J. M. Smith, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary Deconstruction A hermeneutic that purports to show that nothing stands behind texts – no author, no referents – and that all presence is illusory. Hermeneutic Principles and presumptions brought to the act of reading or interpretation that complete or settle the meaning of an indeterminate text. Interpretive Community A social group that shares common interests and hermeneutic practices, and so produces a characteristic reading of a text in the act of reading. Intertextuality A network of mutual reference between texts, and between texts and the linguistic and metaphysical systems they rely on. May be seen as the sum of all referents, but as simulating reference to entities outside the text. Scholia Marginal commentary typographically segregated from a text. Text Formerly a writing specimen deemed authoritative; now frequently any coherent signifying system or configuration of signs. Textual Indeterminacy The proposition that the meaning conveyed in any text is incomplete, and is only completed, in one of may possible ways, in the act of reading through interaction with the interests and hermeneutic practices of an interpretive community. Textuality Formerly a principle of literal interpretation; now to be a coherent system of signs or to possess the qualities of a text.
Introduction Geographers began to make frequent use of the concepts of text and textuality in the 1980s, as part of the widespread hermeneutic, interpretive, or cultural turn then underway in all of the social sciences. In geography, as elsewhere, the social scientists who took this turn were a motley collection of humanists, Marxists, feminists, and postmodernists who shared little beside an aversion to positivist social science and an intuition that a more satisfying human geography could be fashioned after the likeness of the humanities. Geographers who took this turn wished to practice geography as a hermeneutic discipline in the manner of literary critics, not as a positivist science in the manner of physicists or biologists. The appeal of the literary critic as a role model was hardly the same for every geographer drawn in this
direction, but for most it lay in the geographers’ perception of the literary critic as a scholar who responded to meaning, changed meaning, produced meaning. Although a scientist may study meaning, explain how it is generated and what social function it fulfills, he should not be himself moved by those meanings or motivated to produce them. As Max Weber famously put it, the scientist is disenchanted. His concern is to explain the numinous power of language and ritual, not to fall under their spell or to take them up as instruments of social manipulation. For geography to be practiced as a hermeneutic discipline with mental habits and scholarly practices like those of literary criticism, the concept of the text would have to move to the center of geographic thought. A hermeneutic is, after all, an interpretive strategy or way of reading a text, and literary criticism criticizes literature. The concept of the text was, moreover, assured of a central place in the thought of anyone concerned with meaning by the fact that, just before geographers made the hermeneutic turn, a revolution in literary criticism had produced and promulgated a new theory of text that made the word text applicable to many things that were not literary works or verbal artifacts, and that also appeared to have in it power to change the world. This new theory posited what might be called the textuality of human experience – its pervasive text-like quality – and it gave geographers who took the hermeneutic turn an alternative to positivist science that was, nevertheless, an alternative reassuringly similar to science in its universal pretensions, abstraction, seeming rigor, and promise of instrumental power. Before proceeding any further into this new theory of text and textuality, we must, however, review the traditional concept of the text and its relevance for geography.
Text as Authoritative Edition Historically and in vernacular usage, text is written words, and a text is a discrete unit of written words such as a book, poem, or letter. Textual scholarship is the study of this sort of text as a verbal artifact. It is not only concerned with the meaning encoded in the text, but also with problems such as assigning the probable date of composition, attributing authorship, and identifying and excising corruptions, such as errors unwittingly introduced by typesetters and copyists and emendations intentionally inserted by redactors and commentators. The original purpose of textual scholarship was to
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produce authoritative editions of important verbal artifacts, editions that textual scholars believed most perfectly embodied the final intention of the person or community that wrote it. This sort of textual scholarship does not attempt to stop controversy over the proper interpretation of the words, only over the words themselves. Biblical scholarship is the prototype of all Western textual scholarship. Given that the Bible was generally believed to be inspired, authoritative, canonical, and the word of God, it is hardly surprising that serious efforts were made to recover and then preserve the words of scripture in their original form. The character of text and the basic function of textual scholarship can be seen by briefly considering one book of the Bible, the Gospel according to Mark. Textual scholarship suggests that the story told in Mark (and the other gospels) began as an oral tradition in the early Christian community. This oral tradition combined eyewitness accounts of the words and acts of Jesus with commentary added when the community recursively interpreted these words and acts in light of the crucifixion and resurrection. So long as this remained an oral tradition, this description and commentary was an ‘open text’ subject to emendation and deletion. When it was written down sometime around AD 64, however, the text was closed and the words were more or less fixed for all time. Commentary did not stop when the words were fixed, however. It moved to the margin of the page, as scholia and footnotes, to the front or back of the book, as preface or endnotes, or into separate texts such as homilies and commentaries. This may be the defining character of a text understood as an authoritative edition: the separation and subsequent typographic segregation of the original, edited, and now closed text (normally placed at the center of the page or volume) from subsequent commentary on that text (pushed to the margins, ends, or outside the covers). Separation and segregation mark the two basic functions of textual criticism: editing, which judges which available version is the best expression of authorial intention, and annotation, which judges which interpretation of this intention is the best understanding of authorial intention. Annotators and commentators who perform this second function make the meaning of a text accessible. Their work has three basic aspects. The first is proposing the hermeneutic, interpretive strategy, or way of reading appropriate to the work at hand. In the case of early Biblical commentators, this came down to urging literal or allegorical readings, although in time Biblical hermeneutics multiplied to include typologically, anagogically, and moral readings. The second aspect is exegesis of cryptic, difficult, or recalcitrant passages intelligible only to a reader skilled in the hermeneutic. The third aspect, which becomes important as the closed text ages,
is historical explanation of the increasingly alien circumstances of the author and intended audience. Beginning in the Renaissance, an ever-growing number of texts were thought to deserve textual treatment. Scholars edited authoritative editions of classical authors and resumed the work of classical annotators. By the nineteenth century, scholars produced authoritative editions of, and copious commentaries on, works by living authors. It must be noted that the several functions of textual criticism assume or loose importance when textual scholarship shifts its attention from ancient to modern texts. The editorial function does not disappear, as there remain questions of which draft or edition to accept as the best expression of authorial intention, as well as questions about the degree to which the text expresses intentions of editors and collaborators rather than the author, but it ceases to be an exacting philological exercise. Annotation and commentary at the same time become largely a matter of proposing the appropriate hermeneutic and exegesis of cryptic passages, for the circumstances and language of the author are, when the author is modern, very often the circumstances and language of his audience. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that literary criticism in the twentieth century became very largely a matter of proposing alternative readings of cryptic texts. We may suppose that if the critic of modern literature is to be employed, it will have to be at interpretation of cryptic material, for the works of modern authors are seldom badly corrupted or rendered inaccessible by archaism. At the same time, modern authors who wish to attract critical attention will have to write inaccessible works that give critics room to exhibit interpretive virtuosity. This is not the whole story, but it goes some way toward explaining the difficulty of much modern literature, and why twentieth-century literary criticism, which geographers making the hermeneutic turn took as their model, was almost entirely a hermeneutic enterprise. Before describing the character of this hermeneutic enterprise, we should note some examples of authoritative editions in geography. Richard Hakluyt, who became the first academic English geographer when he was appointed to a post at Oxford in 1617, was an editor of what might well be called an authoritative edition. Hakluyt’s Voyages, released in three volumes between 1598 and 1600, collected accounts written by European mariners. Few geographers since have taken on this editorial task, a notable instance being the collection of ancient, medieval, and early modern geographic texts edited by George Kish in 1978. Geographers have more often engaged with texts as commentators, although here, again, the tradition is weak because the field acknowledges no great and indispensable work from the hand of a past geographer. Nothing in the geographical literature is thought to possess the
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enduring value that the other social sciences grant to works by scholars like Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Max Weber. It is telling that what may be the most admired commentary by a geographer, David Harvey’s Limits to Capital, elucidates a text by the political economist Karl Marx. Because geographic literature is largely modeled on the natural sciences, where books are rare and the half-life or articles is short, and because the aim of the academic geographical has so frequently changed, geographers have limited experience with text in the sense of authoritative edition.
Textuality Until about 1970, textuality was a rather arcane legal term denoting a principle to be followed when interpreting constitutions, laws, and treaties. Following the principle of textuality, such documents were to be interpreted almost exclusively on the basis of the actual words in which they were written. This principle of textuality was opposed to the principle of contextuality, or the teleological approach, which maintained that judicial interpretation of legal documents should attempt to recover and follow the intentions of the parties who wrote the constitution, law, or treaty. An electronic search of academic papers shows that, beginning in 1970, the word textuality became increasingly, and in time overwhelmingly, a term of academic jargon concentrated in literary criticism but present throughout the humanities and social sciences. The term climbed to a peak of popularity in 1994, and thereafter fell into a notable but by no means terminal slump. In this literary usage the word textuality has several rival definitions, all of which come down to possessing the properties of a text. The popularity of the term textuality was a direct consequence of a radical change in what academics meant by the word text. Carried out under the heading of post-structualism, this change had two parts. The first was that ‘text’ no longer denoted only verbal artifacts, but now denoted any system of signs possessed of textuality. Thus it became possible to speak of a building, a dream, a social situation, a landscape, or anything else not utterly meaningless as a text. Indeed, because systems of signs referenced one another in a vast ‘intertextual’ network, which embraced the conceptual apparatus of language and metaphysics, as well as particular verbal and nonverbal works, the entire world appeared possessed of textuality, and one could describe world of human experience as a text. The second part of the change was a presumption of textual indeterminacy. The meaning of a text was no longer thought to have completely resided in the author’s intentions, or to completely reside in the words on the page or the signs in the system. The meaning, indeed for
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some the text itself, was now thought to be produced by a relationship between a system of signs and an interpretive community. Post-structural meaning was not conveyed from author to reader by the written word (or other sign system); it was produced in the act of reading or interpretation that occurred when certain hermeneutic presumptions and practices were brought to bear on a particular sign system. Semiotic Anthropology and Humanistic Geography The expanded definition of text as any system of signs had immediate appeal for anthropologists who followed Max Weber in the belief that humans desire meaning above all else, and who began to speak of rituals, ordinary behavior, and even the whole of culture as a text. The most influential and eloquent proponent of this semiotic approach was Clifford Geertz, but he was part of a broad consensus that spread beyond anthropology into fields like geography. This consensus maintained that culture is essentially expressive, so that the behavior of any culture should be understood, not as a functional adaptation to the environment, but as an expression of the consciousness and subjective experience of persons in that culture. Culture is not a tool, as functionalists had argued, but a collective work of art that externalizes the unique sensibility of the group, much as a poem externalizes the sensibility of the poet. Perhaps the most famous example of this interpretive approach is Clifford Geertz’s essay, Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight (1972), which argues that the popular but, to the casual eye, mundane cockfight is, for the Balinese, ‘‘a Balinese reading of Balinese experience.’’ Geertz explains this reading as a subtle meditation on the ambivalent feelings toward rage and the fear of rage that lie at the heart of Balinese sensibility. Externalizing these emotions in the cockfight serves to communicate this sensibility to young Balinese, who must be socialized to the mores of the group, and as a means of catharsis for adults already socialized to the Balinese style of feeling. Thus culture is, in this semiotic account, very largely a matter of edification, instructing youth in the sensibility (or hermeneutic) that is the culture, and permitting adults to reflect on this understanding. Much the same approach was taken in geography by writers like J. B. Jackson, Pierce Lewis, and Wilbur Zelinsky who spoke of ‘‘reading the landscape.’’ In this work, best exemplified in the essays collected in The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes, there is an assumption that the landscape is expressive, as well as functional, and that what it expresses is the unique sensibility of the people who made and inhabit it. This approach is often criticized for overinterpreting the ordinary. The proffered interpretation may fit the facts, but it is also very often a post hoc construction
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made by the interpreter with little resemblance to any message actually sent or received by members of the group whose behavior or landscape is being interpreted. The Balinese cockfight can be interpreted as something rich and suggestive as a symbolist poem – this much Geertz has shown – but there is no evidence that anyone but Geertz and his students intends or sees these meanings. Geographers who read ordinary landscapes as expressive texts are open to this same criticism. The meaning they discover in the landscape is, in fact, often a meaning largely supplied by their own subtle, educated, and articulated intelligence. The charge of overinterpretation is not altogether devastating if one is working with post-structuralist assumptions, though, for if meaning is produced in the act of reading, then every interpretation is an overinterpretation. To say that a reading overinterprets is simply another way of saying that the text alone is indeterminate, and does not by itself force any single meaning onto every reader. The Hermeneutics of Suspicion Critics of literary and other texts have various responses to the problem of textual indeterminacy, authorial intention being the most common solution. For others, indeterminacy reduces a text to something like a blank page onto which any reader may project his or her interests. Reader response theory expresses this in the formula: ‘you can only read what you’ve already read’ (how you read anything in the first place being a troubling enigma). More commonly, critics recognize that, while many readings are possible, some readings are better, more powerful than others. The better reading is often said to be the reading that is most comprehensive, that accounts for most of what there is in the text, and perhaps context, to be accounted for. Reading C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as a Christian allegory is, for instance, more comprehensive than reading it as the adventures of three children in a magic land because the first reading finds meaning in actions that are, to the second reading, arbitrary and accidental. Comprehensiveness does not settle disputes between interpretive communities, though, since the interpretation that impresses me as most comprehensive is the interpretation that takes into account those aspects of text and context that my interpretive community tells me ought to be taken into account. A materialist critic would not be satisfied to take Lewis’s religious views into account, for instance, and would likely insist that a powerful interpretation comprehend his sexual behavior or class interests. Beginning in the 1960s, the hermeneutic disciplines were increasingly dominated by an interpretive community that believed any comprehensive interpretation
must take in the concealed intentions and hidden agendas that the community presumed to stand behind all texts. Paul Ricoeur (1970) called this reading strategy ‘‘the hermeneutics of suspicion,’’ and described it as ‘‘a method of interpretation which assumes that the literal or surface-level meaning of a text is an effort to conceal the political interests which are served by the text,’’ and that ‘‘the purpose of interpretation is to strip off the concealment, unmasking those interests.’’ This hermeneutic suffers the flaw of the liar’s paradox, for writing about writing describes itself, but it has been very popular among geographers, who practice it in the forms of deconstruction and the power/knowledge analysis of Michelle Foucalt. Deconstruction Summarizing deconstruction is more difficult than doing deconstruction, because paraphrasing Derrida is difficult as lifting a haystack with two hands: the problem being not the weight, but the incoherence. Equivocation and the portentous jargon impress some readers as profundity; others feel only irritation. The central claim of deconstruction is that ‘presence’ is an illusion conjured by the text. Presence denotes being, or that which exists outside the text as independent reality. Deconstruction maintains, roughly, that everything referred to in every text has the ontological status of a character in a novel, so that words like Sun, I, or truth can no more be said to have a real world referent than the name Oliver Twist can be said to have a real world referent. To think of a world of beings independent of the text is, therefore, deluded in the same way it would be deluded to think that the characters in a soap opera continue their affairs after the program has ended. This argument rests on what many see as two rather obvious category mistakes. The first is the mistake of reading nonfiction as if it were fiction, a misreading surely as disastrous as reading a novel believing that the characters, places, and events it describes are real. The second is the error of treating concepts, and even things, as if they were words. In the linguistics of Ferdianand de Sassure, from which deconstruction is derived, a sign is said to have two parts: the signifier and the signified. The signifier is the sound with which the word is vocalized, or the mark with which it is written; the signified is the concept or meaning communicated by that word. Now, as we can see by the fact that humans speak many languages, signifiers are arbitrary and conventional. Deconstruction takes this fact, true of signifiers, and extends it to the concepts they signify, and holds that these, too, are arbitrary conventions. One reason to doubt this is that human languages, though many, are translatable. Deconstruction is a critical technique suited to works of fiction, and appealing to scholars who believe, or wish
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to believe, that the world itself is fictional, a cultural construction that was made up after the fancy of one imagination, and that might, therefore, be revised to suit the fancy of another imagination. Critical geography rightly supposes that deconstruction underwrites claims for the cultural construction of reality, and wrongly supposes that it supports progressive politics. Knowledge/power Interpretation In deconstruction the textualized and fictional world is the mask of nothing; in the hermeneutic propounded by Michelle Foucault it is the mask of power. In the first reading, texts conceal the abyss of a cosmos that is as nonexistent as Oliver Twist. In the second reading, texts conceal a conspiracy that legitimates and naturalizes an interpretation of the world that serves the interests of powerful people. Foucault’s analysis rests on the two basic features of the post-structuralist text. First, it sees the world as an object of interpretation rather than scientific investigation. It is a text, but an indeterminate text construed by ‘discourses’ and open to many interpretations, no one intrinsically deserving privilege over any other. Second, it sees the meaning of this text as created in the act of reading by a particular interpretive community, for whom the readings is a tool serving the interest of the community. Dominant or hegemonic groups are able to impose their interpretation on subordinate groups, and so trick them into working against their own interests. The mighty are aided in this ideological swindle by the fact that the discourses that make up their interpretation of the world are embodied in language, law, science, and landscape, and so come to be naturalized and accepted as normal. This sort of power/knowledge analysis has much in common with deconstruction, which is hardly surprising since both grew out of the same mix of Marxist existentialism and the counterculture of the 1960s. Foucaldian readings have been more popular in geography, no doubt because the hermeneutic is more obviously suited to social analysis, and because it seems, at first, to offer aid to marginalized minorities in their struggle against power. This last impression is almost certainly mistaken, since reducing knowledge to power deprives the weak of truth, historically their best weapon against power.
Conclusion Geographers who practice geography as a hermeneutic discipline typically work with one of these three views of textuality. Humanistic geographers who take the semiotic approach have generally interpreted landscapes as expressive sign systems; however this approach has fallen out of favor as the view of culture as consensus has
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been replaced by a view of culture as contested and conflict-ridden. Deconstructionists have generally deconstructed the concepts and ontological presumptions of scientific geography, the text they criticize being the conceptual apparatus of language and metaphysics. Foucaldians have generally directed their power/knowledge analysis at particular embodiments of hegemonic knowledge that, they believe, permeate everyday practices and the written word as minutely as ‘capillaries’. Exposing the self-serving assumptions of colonial literature has been especially popular. The concepts of text and textuality were undoubtedly central to the transformation of a part of human geography into a post-positivist hermeneutic discipline. The existence of today’s ‘critical geography’ is proof that geography can be practiced after the fashion of literary criticism – at least literary criticism of one sort – and not only after the fashion of positivist science. The great limitation of text, textuality, and the critical mode, and their great hazard, is that they tempt geographers to exaggerate the similarities between the sign systems of landscapes or nonfictional geographic writing and the sign systems of novels and poems, to mistake things for words. See also: Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems; Creativity; Critical Geography; Cultural Studies and Human Geography; Culture; Deconstruction; Discourse; Humanism/Humanistic Geography; Landscape; Landscape Iconography; Language; Media; Nature, History of; Oral History; Orientalism; Polyvocality; Representation and Re-presentation; Representation, Politics of; Resistance; Semiotics; Text, Textual Analysis; Travel and Travel-Writing.
Further Reading Barnes, T. J. and Duncan, J. S. (eds.) (1992). Writing worlds: Discourse, text and metaphor in the representation of landscape. London: Routledge. Curry, M. R. (1996). The work in the world: Geographical practice and the written word. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Duncan, J. S. (1990). The city as text: The politics of landscape interpretation in the Kandyan kingdom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grant, R. (2003). Imagining the real: Essays on politics, ideology, and literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hanks, W. F. (2000). Texts and textuality. Annual Review of Anthropology 18, 95--127. Meinig, D. W. (ed.) (1979). The interpretation of ordinary landscapes: Geographical essays. New York: Oxford University Press. Ricoeur, P. (1970). Freud and philosophy: An essay on interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press. Schneider, M. A. (1987). Culture-as-text in the work of Clifford Geertz. Theory and Society 16, 809--839. Sosnoski, J. J. (1977). The use of the word ‘‘text’’ in critical discourse. College English 39, 121--137. Steiner, G. (1989). Real presences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Glossary Deconstruction A hermeneutic that purports to show that nothing stands behind texts – no author, no referents – and that all presence is illusory. Hermeneutic Principles and presumptions brought to the act of reading or interpretation that complete or settle the meaning of an indeterminate text. Interpretive Community A social group that shares common interests and hermeneutic practices, and so produces a characteristic reading of a text in the act of reading. Intertextuality A network of mutual reference between texts, and between texts and the linguistic and metaphysical systems they rely on. May be seen as the sum of all referents, but as simulating reference to entities outside the text. Scholia Marginal commentary typographically segregated from a text. Text Formerly a writing specimen deemed authoritative; now frequently any coherent signifying system or configuration of signs. Textual Indeterminacy The proposition that the meaning conveyed in any text is incomplete, and is only completed, in one of may possible ways, in the act of reading through interaction with the interests and hermeneutic practices of an interpretive community. Textuality Formerly a principle of literal interpretation; now to be a coherent system of signs or to possess the qualities of a text.
Introduction Geographers began to make frequent use of the concepts of text and textuality in the 1980s, as part of the widespread hermeneutic, interpretive, or cultural turn then underway in all of the social sciences. In geography, as elsewhere, the social scientists who took this turn were a motley collection of humanists, Marxists, feminists, and postmodernists who shared little beside an aversion to positivist social science and an intuition that a more satisfying human geography could be fashioned after the likeness of the humanities. Geographers who took this turn wished to practice geography as a hermeneutic discipline in the manner of literary critics, not as a positivist science in the manner of physicists or biologists. The appeal of the literary critic as a role model was hardly the same for every geographer drawn in this
direction, but for most it lay in the geographers’ perception of the literary critic as a scholar who responded to meaning, changed meaning, produced meaning. Although a scientist may study meaning, explain how it is generated and what social function it fulfills, he should not be himself moved by those meanings or motivated to produce them. As Max Weber famously put it, the scientist is disenchanted. His concern is to explain the numinous power of language and ritual, not to fall under their spell or to take them up as instruments of social manipulation. For geography to be practiced as a hermeneutic discipline with mental habits and scholarly practices like those of literary criticism, the concept of the text would have to move to the center of geographic thought. A hermeneutic is, after all, an interpretive strategy or way of reading a text, and literary criticism criticizes literature. The concept of the text was, moreover, assured of a central place in the thought of anyone concerned with meaning by the fact that, just before geographers made the hermeneutic turn, a revolution in literary criticism had produced and promulgated a new theory of text that made the word text applicable to many things that were not literary works or verbal artifacts, and that also appeared to have in it power to change the world. This new theory posited what might be called the textuality of human experience – its pervasive text-like quality – and it gave geographers who took the hermeneutic turn an alternative to positivist science that was, nevertheless, an alternative reassuringly similar to science in its universal pretensions, abstraction, seeming rigor, and promise of instrumental power. Before proceeding any further into this new theory of text and textuality, we must, however, review the traditional concept of the text and its relevance for geography.
Text as Authoritative Edition Historically and in vernacular usage, text is written words, and a text is a discrete unit of written words such as a book, poem, or letter. Textual scholarship is the study of this sort of text as a verbal artifact. It is not only concerned with the meaning encoded in the text, but also with problems such as assigning the probable date of composition, attributing authorship, and identifying and excising corruptions, such as errors unwittingly introduced by typesetters and copyists and emendations intentionally inserted by redactors and commentators. The original purpose of textual scholarship was to
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produce authoritative editions of important verbal artifacts, editions that textual scholars believed most perfectly embodied the final intention of the person or community that wrote it. This sort of textual scholarship does not attempt to stop controversy over the proper interpretation of the words, only over the words themselves. Biblical scholarship is the prototype of all Western textual scholarship. Given that the Bible was generally believed to be inspired, authoritative, canonical, and the word of God, it is hardly surprising that serious efforts were made to recover and then preserve the words of scripture in their original form. The character of text and the basic function of textual scholarship can be seen by briefly considering one book of the Bible, the Gospel according to Mark. Textual scholarship suggests that the story told in Mark (and the other gospels) began as an oral tradition in the early Christian community. This oral tradition combined eyewitness accounts of the words and acts of Jesus with commentary added when the community recursively interpreted these words and acts in light of the crucifixion and resurrection. So long as this remained an oral tradition, this description and commentary was an ‘open text’ subject to emendation and deletion. When it was written down sometime around AD 64, however, the text was closed and the words were more or less fixed for all time. Commentary did not stop when the words were fixed, however. It moved to the margin of the page, as scholia and footnotes, to the front or back of the book, as preface or endnotes, or into separate texts such as homilies and commentaries. This may be the defining character of a text understood as an authoritative edition: the separation and subsequent typographic segregation of the original, edited, and now closed text (normally placed at the center of the page or volume) from subsequent commentary on that text (pushed to the margins, ends, or outside the covers). Separation and segregation mark the two basic functions of textual criticism: editing, which judges which available version is the best expression of authorial intention, and annotation, which judges which interpretation of this intention is the best understanding of authorial intention. Annotators and commentators who perform this second function make the meaning of a text accessible. Their work has three basic aspects. The first is proposing the hermeneutic, interpretive strategy, or way of reading appropriate to the work at hand. In the case of early Biblical commentators, this came down to urging literal or allegorical readings, although in time Biblical hermeneutics multiplied to include typologically, anagogically, and moral readings. The second aspect is exegesis of cryptic, difficult, or recalcitrant passages intelligible only to a reader skilled in the hermeneutic. The third aspect, which becomes important as the closed text ages,
is historical explanation of the increasingly alien circumstances of the author and intended audience. Beginning in the Renaissance, an ever-growing number of texts were thought to deserve textual treatment. Scholars edited authoritative editions of classical authors and resumed the work of classical annotators. By the nineteenth century, scholars produced authoritative editions of, and copious commentaries on, works by living authors. It must be noted that the several functions of textual criticism assume or loose importance when textual scholarship shifts its attention from ancient to modern texts. The editorial function does not disappear, as there remain questions of which draft or edition to accept as the best expression of authorial intention, as well as questions about the degree to which the text expresses intentions of editors and collaborators rather than the author, but it ceases to be an exacting philological exercise. Annotation and commentary at the same time become largely a matter of proposing the appropriate hermeneutic and exegesis of cryptic passages, for the circumstances and language of the author are, when the author is modern, very often the circumstances and language of his audience. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that literary criticism in the twentieth century became very largely a matter of proposing alternative readings of cryptic texts. We may suppose that if the critic of modern literature is to be employed, it will have to be at interpretation of cryptic material, for the works of modern authors are seldom badly corrupted or rendered inaccessible by archaism. At the same time, modern authors who wish to attract critical attention will have to write inaccessible works that give critics room to exhibit interpretive virtuosity. This is not the whole story, but it goes some way toward explaining the difficulty of much modern literature, and why twentieth-century literary criticism, which geographers making the hermeneutic turn took as their model, was almost entirely a hermeneutic enterprise. Before describing the character of this hermeneutic enterprise, we should note some examples of authoritative editions in geography. Richard Hakluyt, who became the first academic English geographer when he was appointed to a post at Oxford in 1617, was an editor of what might well be called an authoritative edition. Hakluyt’s Voyages, released in three volumes between 1598 and 1600, collected accounts written by European mariners. Few geographers since have taken on this editorial task, a notable instance being the collection of ancient, medieval, and early modern geographic texts edited by George Kish in 1978. Geographers have more often engaged with texts as commentators, although here, again, the tradition is weak because the field acknowledges no great and indispensable work from the hand of a past geographer. Nothing in the geographical literature is thought to possess the
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enduring value that the other social sciences grant to works by scholars like Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Max Weber. It is telling that what may be the most admired commentary by a geographer, David Harvey’s Limits to Capital, elucidates a text by the political economist Karl Marx. Because geographic literature is largely modeled on the natural sciences, where books are rare and the half-life or articles is short, and because the aim of the academic geographical has so frequently changed, geographers have limited experience with text in the sense of authoritative edition.
Textuality Until about 1970, textuality was a rather arcane legal term denoting a principle to be followed when interpreting constitutions, laws, and treaties. Following the principle of textuality, such documents were to be interpreted almost exclusively on the basis of the actual words in which they were written. This principle of textuality was opposed to the principle of contextuality, or the teleological approach, which maintained that judicial interpretation of legal documents should attempt to recover and follow the intentions of the parties who wrote the constitution, law, or treaty. An electronic search of academic papers shows that, beginning in 1970, the word textuality became increasingly, and in time overwhelmingly, a term of academic jargon concentrated in literary criticism but present throughout the humanities and social sciences. The term climbed to a peak of popularity in 1994, and thereafter fell into a notable but by no means terminal slump. In this literary usage the word textuality has several rival definitions, all of which come down to possessing the properties of a text. The popularity of the term textuality was a direct consequence of a radical change in what academics meant by the word text. Carried out under the heading of post-structualism, this change had two parts. The first was that ‘text’ no longer denoted only verbal artifacts, but now denoted any system of signs possessed of textuality. Thus it became possible to speak of a building, a dream, a social situation, a landscape, or anything else not utterly meaningless as a text. Indeed, because systems of signs referenced one another in a vast ‘intertextual’ network, which embraced the conceptual apparatus of language and metaphysics, as well as particular verbal and nonverbal works, the entire world appeared possessed of textuality, and one could describe world of human experience as a text. The second part of the change was a presumption of textual indeterminacy. The meaning of a text was no longer thought to have completely resided in the author’s intentions, or to completely reside in the words on the page or the signs in the system. The meaning, indeed for
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some the text itself, was now thought to be produced by a relationship between a system of signs and an interpretive community. Post-structural meaning was not conveyed from author to reader by the written word (or other sign system); it was produced in the act of reading or interpretation that occurred when certain hermeneutic presumptions and practices were brought to bear on a particular sign system. Semiotic Anthropology and Humanistic Geography The expanded definition of text as any system of signs had immediate appeal for anthropologists who followed Max Weber in the belief that humans desire meaning above all else, and who began to speak of rituals, ordinary behavior, and even the whole of culture as a text. The most influential and eloquent proponent of this semiotic approach was Clifford Geertz, but he was part of a broad consensus that spread beyond anthropology into fields like geography. This consensus maintained that culture is essentially expressive, so that the behavior of any culture should be understood, not as a functional adaptation to the environment, but as an expression of the consciousness and subjective experience of persons in that culture. Culture is not a tool, as functionalists had argued, but a collective work of art that externalizes the unique sensibility of the group, much as a poem externalizes the sensibility of the poet. Perhaps the most famous example of this interpretive approach is Clifford Geertz’s essay, Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight (1972), which argues that the popular but, to the casual eye, mundane cockfight is, for the Balinese, ‘‘a Balinese reading of Balinese experience.’’ Geertz explains this reading as a subtle meditation on the ambivalent feelings toward rage and the fear of rage that lie at the heart of Balinese sensibility. Externalizing these emotions in the cockfight serves to communicate this sensibility to young Balinese, who must be socialized to the mores of the group, and as a means of catharsis for adults already socialized to the Balinese style of feeling. Thus culture is, in this semiotic account, very largely a matter of edification, instructing youth in the sensibility (or hermeneutic) that is the culture, and permitting adults to reflect on this understanding. Much the same approach was taken in geography by writers like J. B. Jackson, Pierce Lewis, and Wilbur Zelinsky who spoke of ‘‘reading the landscape.’’ In this work, best exemplified in the essays collected in The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes, there is an assumption that the landscape is expressive, as well as functional, and that what it expresses is the unique sensibility of the people who made and inhabit it. This approach is often criticized for overinterpreting the ordinary. The proffered interpretation may fit the facts, but it is also very often a post hoc construction
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made by the interpreter with little resemblance to any message actually sent or received by members of the group whose behavior or landscape is being interpreted. The Balinese cockfight can be interpreted as something rich and suggestive as a symbolist poem – this much Geertz has shown – but there is no evidence that anyone but Geertz and his students intends or sees these meanings. Geographers who read ordinary landscapes as expressive texts are open to this same criticism. The meaning they discover in the landscape is, in fact, often a meaning largely supplied by their own subtle, educated, and articulated intelligence. The charge of overinterpretation is not altogether devastating if one is working with post-structuralist assumptions, though, for if meaning is produced in the act of reading, then every interpretation is an overinterpretation. To say that a reading overinterprets is simply another way of saying that the text alone is indeterminate, and does not by itself force any single meaning onto every reader. The Hermeneutics of Suspicion Critics of literary and other texts have various responses to the problem of textual indeterminacy, authorial intention being the most common solution. For others, indeterminacy reduces a text to something like a blank page onto which any reader may project his or her interests. Reader response theory expresses this in the formula: ‘you can only read what you’ve already read’ (how you read anything in the first place being a troubling enigma). More commonly, critics recognize that, while many readings are possible, some readings are better, more powerful than others. The better reading is often said to be the reading that is most comprehensive, that accounts for most of what there is in the text, and perhaps context, to be accounted for. Reading C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as a Christian allegory is, for instance, more comprehensive than reading it as the adventures of three children in a magic land because the first reading finds meaning in actions that are, to the second reading, arbitrary and accidental. Comprehensiveness does not settle disputes between interpretive communities, though, since the interpretation that impresses me as most comprehensive is the interpretation that takes into account those aspects of text and context that my interpretive community tells me ought to be taken into account. A materialist critic would not be satisfied to take Lewis’s religious views into account, for instance, and would likely insist that a powerful interpretation comprehend his sexual behavior or class interests. Beginning in the 1960s, the hermeneutic disciplines were increasingly dominated by an interpretive community that believed any comprehensive interpretation
must take in the concealed intentions and hidden agendas that the community presumed to stand behind all texts. Paul Ricoeur (1970) called this reading strategy ‘‘the hermeneutics of suspicion,’’ and described it as ‘‘a method of interpretation which assumes that the literal or surface-level meaning of a text is an effort to conceal the political interests which are served by the text,’’ and that ‘‘the purpose of interpretation is to strip off the concealment, unmasking those interests.’’ This hermeneutic suffers the flaw of the liar’s paradox, for writing about writing describes itself, but it has been very popular among geographers, who practice it in the forms of deconstruction and the power/knowledge analysis of Michelle Foucalt. Deconstruction Summarizing deconstruction is more difficult than doing deconstruction, because paraphrasing Derrida is difficult as lifting a haystack with two hands: the problem being not the weight, but the incoherence. Equivocation and the portentous jargon impress some readers as profundity; others feel only irritation. The central claim of deconstruction is that ‘presence’ is an illusion conjured by the text. Presence denotes being, or that which exists outside the text as independent reality. Deconstruction maintains, roughly, that everything referred to in every text has the ontological status of a character in a novel, so that words like Sun, I, or truth can no more be said to have a real world referent than the name Oliver Twist can be said to have a real world referent. To think of a world of beings independent of the text is, therefore, deluded in the same way it would be deluded to think that the characters in a soap opera continue their affairs after the program has ended. This argument rests on what many see as two rather obvious category mistakes. The first is the mistake of reading nonfiction as if it were fiction, a misreading surely as disastrous as reading a novel believing that the characters, places, and events it describes are real. The second is the error of treating concepts, and even things, as if they were words. In the linguistics of Ferdianand de Sassure, from which deconstruction is derived, a sign is said to have two parts: the signifier and the signified. The signifier is the sound with which the word is vocalized, or the mark with which it is written; the signified is the concept or meaning communicated by that word. Now, as we can see by the fact that humans speak many languages, signifiers are arbitrary and conventional. Deconstruction takes this fact, true of signifiers, and extends it to the concepts they signify, and holds that these, too, are arbitrary conventions. One reason to doubt this is that human languages, though many, are translatable. Deconstruction is a critical technique suited to works of fiction, and appealing to scholars who believe, or wish
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to believe, that the world itself is fictional, a cultural construction that was made up after the fancy of one imagination, and that might, therefore, be revised to suit the fancy of another imagination. Critical geography rightly supposes that deconstruction underwrites claims for the cultural construction of reality, and wrongly supposes that it supports progressive politics. Knowledge/power Interpretation In deconstruction the textualized and fictional world is the mask of nothing; in the hermeneutic propounded by Michelle Foucault it is the mask of power. In the first reading, texts conceal the abyss of a cosmos that is as nonexistent as Oliver Twist. In the second reading, texts conceal a conspiracy that legitimates and naturalizes an interpretation of the world that serves the interests of powerful people. Foucault’s analysis rests on the two basic features of the post-structuralist text. First, it sees the world as an object of interpretation rather than scientific investigation. It is a text, but an indeterminate text construed by ‘discourses’ and open to many interpretations, no one intrinsically deserving privilege over any other. Second, it sees the meaning of this text as created in the act of reading by a particular interpretive community, for whom the readings is a tool serving the interest of the community. Dominant or hegemonic groups are able to impose their interpretation on subordinate groups, and so trick them into working against their own interests. The mighty are aided in this ideological swindle by the fact that the discourses that make up their interpretation of the world are embodied in language, law, science, and landscape, and so come to be naturalized and accepted as normal. This sort of power/knowledge analysis has much in common with deconstruction, which is hardly surprising since both grew out of the same mix of Marxist existentialism and the counterculture of the 1960s. Foucaldian readings have been more popular in geography, no doubt because the hermeneutic is more obviously suited to social analysis, and because it seems, at first, to offer aid to marginalized minorities in their struggle against power. This last impression is almost certainly mistaken, since reducing knowledge to power deprives the weak of truth, historically their best weapon against power.
Conclusion Geographers who practice geography as a hermeneutic discipline typically work with one of these three views of textuality. Humanistic geographers who take the semiotic approach have generally interpreted landscapes as expressive sign systems; however this approach has fallen out of favor as the view of culture as consensus has
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been replaced by a view of culture as contested and conflict-ridden. Deconstructionists have generally deconstructed the concepts and ontological presumptions of scientific geography, the text they criticize being the conceptual apparatus of language and metaphysics. Foucaldians have generally directed their power/knowledge analysis at particular embodiments of hegemonic knowledge that, they believe, permeate everyday practices and the written word as minutely as ‘capillaries’. Exposing the self-serving assumptions of colonial literature has been especially popular. The concepts of text and textuality were undoubtedly central to the transformation of a part of human geography into a post-positivist hermeneutic discipline. The existence of today’s ‘critical geography’ is proof that geography can be practiced after the fashion of literary criticism – at least literary criticism of one sort – and not only after the fashion of positivist science. The great limitation of text, textuality, and the critical mode, and their great hazard, is that they tempt geographers to exaggerate the similarities between the sign systems of landscapes or nonfictional geographic writing and the sign systems of novels and poems, to mistake things for words. See also: Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems; Creativity; Critical Geography; Cultural Studies and Human Geography; Culture; Deconstruction; Discourse; Humanism/Humanistic Geography; Landscape; Landscape Iconography; Language; Media; Nature, History of; Oral History; Orientalism; Polyvocality; Representation and Re-presentation; Representation, Politics of; Resistance; Semiotics; Text, Textual Analysis; Travel and Travel-Writing.
Further Reading Barnes, T. J. and Duncan, J. S. (eds.) (1992). Writing worlds: Discourse, text and metaphor in the representation of landscape. London: Routledge. Curry, M. R. (1996). The work in the world: Geographical practice and the written word. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Duncan, J. S. (1990). The city as text: The politics of landscape interpretation in the Kandyan kingdom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grant, R. (2003). Imagining the real: Essays on politics, ideology, and literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hanks, W. F. (2000). Texts and textuality. Annual Review of Anthropology 18, 95--127. Meinig, D. W. (ed.) (1979). The interpretation of ordinary landscapes: Geographical essays. New York: Oxford University Press. Ricoeur, P. (1970). Freud and philosophy: An essay on interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press. Schneider, M. A. (1987). Culture-as-text in the work of Clifford Geertz. Theory and Society 16, 809--839. Sosnoski, J. J. (1977). The use of the word ‘‘text’’ in critical discourse. College English 39, 121--137. Steiner, G. (1989). Real presences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.